Interview With the Vampire: Eric Bogosian on How Daniel's History With Louis Impacts the Story (Exclusive)
While Anne Rice's novel Interview With the Vampire is set in the 1970s with a young reporter — later known as Daniel Molloy — interviewing the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac, the iconic work of literature is very much just a starting point for AMC's series of the same name. In the series, viewers see a much older Daniel meeting with the eternal Louis in the present day for what is revealed to be a second interview, with the book's session now a part of the story's past. And as viewers have come to learn, that first interview didn't go especially well, which in turn leads to some strained interactions between journalist and subject and now, Daniel Molloy actor Eric Bogosian explains how that previous experience impacts the story — and how both Daniel and Louis are using that first experience to guide the new interview.
"I think Louis tries to use it to put some guardrails along the side of what he's going to be doing here, and like I said, Daniel and myself, we get bullied, and we don't go with that," Bogosian told ComicBook.com. "There's another element here, though, and it's something that Jacob [Anderson] brought up when we were working together, which was, he said, 'Louis knew you when you were young.' And that's kind of a weird thing because again, I know from where I'm standing in my late 60s that that stuff that all happened a long time ago is very important to me. But talking about unreliable witness, I'm an unreliably witness to my own life. And then you run into somebody who really knew. And he uses that knowledge to work me all the time. And that becomes kind of a threat."
He continued, "There's of course the thing that, what if things had come out differently then? What if I'd been killed? What if I had become a vampire? What if… a lot of what ifs. And then here we are now. When you get an opportunity to revisit a place that you think you might have lost a big chance, then people… That's the old story, the Facebook thing, where your high school romance finds you and you're on a date at 45 years old with the person that you had a crush on when you were 16. And it's pretty f-cked up actually. It's weird stuff. So, there's a lot of that. I think there's a lot of that in there, too. Who were we? It's hard to get at. This is show is kind of poetic in that way, as is Anne Rice. And so, a lot of things can't be spoken in clear sentences. It's about surrounding it with the poetry."
What is Interview With the Vampire About?
A sensuous, contemporary reinvention of Anne Rice's revolutionary gothic novel, Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire follows Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), and Claudia's (Bailey Bass) epic story of love, blood, and the perils of immortality, as told to journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian). Chafing at the limitations of life as a Black man in 1900s New Orleans, Louis finds it impossible to resist the rakish Lestat de Lioncourt's offer of the ultimate escape: joining him as his vampire companion. But Louis's intoxicating new powers come with a violent price, and the introduction of Lestat's newest fledgling, the child vampire Claudia, soon sets them on a decades-long path of revenge and atonement.
Interview With the Vampire airs Sundays at 10/9c on AMC. You can also stream new episodes on AMC+.